Search

Welcome to the DeVos University where our motto is: Reddere Ludere or Pay to Play.

Redde ludere

As part of your orientation to your shiny and new look university, we offer you our standard Online Sexual Harassment Training Course at the end of which you can choose between different malpractice insurance packages – we can help you to decide which one is right for you depending upon your status (social identity factors), your profile (visibility in the profession), your friendship networks and your usefulness to the university.

The university in the past was an antiquated place where people sat around reading and thinking and exchanging ideas. It was a boring and dull place in which, to misquote W.H. Auden on poetry, nothing happened. But today, we offer you a new educational environment in which different opportunities exist for maximizing your potential and the potential of those you coach in a crowded marketplace of purchasable intellectual material.

In order to begin advertising your thoughts you need to develop online curricula (that can be sold), textbooks (that can also be sold) and a series of lectures which your university will buy back from you for the price of what we used to call your “salary.” Now, your salary will be docked according to how much you owe the university for the use of your own lectures, for malpractice suit coverage, for any counseling you need as you navigate this difficult process and for bi-monthly sexual harassment training sessions. Please do not be alarmed if the deductions for these services, along with standard deductions for health care, taxes and retirement, actually come to more than your salary. You believe in education after all so now is your chance to prove it by paying to elevate the minds of the youth in your care.

We will help you to develop your intellectual persona over time as a brand and then show you how to maximize that brand and you might even, eventually, make some money back on it!

But, before we get into how you can actually make money in addition to teaching, prepping, publishing and administering programs (and we do suggest looking into opportunities for second jobs at local coffee houses and grocery stores), we need to make sure you are protected from nasty grievances that may arise as you counsel our student clients and guide them to higher learning. And, of course, protecting you means protecting the university so this is extremely important. Please spend at least 12 hours on the online training course, this is not simply a matter of learning the material, which can be done rather quickly, it is required for the insurance coverage that we may offer you at the end of the course.

By way of an introduction to your sexual harassment training kit, please click the cute emoji marked NOT WAVING, DROWNING to continue. You will then enter the sexual harassment training portal and we will lead you through some real-world scenarios in which you are forced to make some hard decisions and pay more money to the university.

But first please answer the first question in order to establish your “status”:

Are you:

A) A straight white man – if yes, please bypass the first section. In fact, you will find that you can bypass many of the sections.

B) A queer person – if yes, consider purchasing our full coverage and making monthly contributions to a “potential law suit” defense fund.

C) A Woman – please sign a university indemnification form. This form confirms that even if you need to press charges against a colleague or university employee or student for harassing you, and indeed, 90% of all cases are women harassed by men, you guarantee that you will never sue the university.

D) A person of color – our insurance plans do not offer coverage for all law suits you may run into, consider extra coverage and a monthly contribution fund.

E) A queer person of color – you are on your own.

Section One

Read through these scenarios and answer the questions that follow:
1. A woman has reported to HR that you insisted upon engaging with her sexually in exchange for good grades in your class. According to her grievance, you insisted that she wanted sex with you and you disregarded her obvious discomfort. You later failed her in the class. Please answer according to your “status.”

A. White guy – do you marry her? Denounce her as delusional to all who will listen? Feel confident that it will all blow over? Explain that this is just run of the mill heterosexual sex and you “get that a lot” – what’s the big deal?

B. Queer person – do you point out that you are queer and not sexually interested in her? Counter sue alleging that she came on to you?

C. White woman – skip this section, we all know women don’t have “sex” with other women.

D. Person of color – hire a lawyer and prepare to go to jail

E. Queer person of color – your life is over.

2. A group of women specifically bring a charge against a white man who has engaged in multiple accounts of sexual abuse, sexual assault, and slander. The women all have remarkably similar stories. Law suits are in the offing. Should the university:

A. Talk to the man in question and tell him to marry as many of the aggrieved students as possible?

B. Investigate further because the fact that the women all have similar stories sounds suspicious?

C. Call upon the man’s friends on campus to support him and hold him up as a genius who has just been misunderstood?

D. Ask his wife, and his ex-wife, and his first wife to come in and testify on his behalf?

E. Get him an opportunity to write an op. ed. explaining what happened?

F. Offer him a very nice retirement package with full benefits, a house in the Bahamas and free access to study abroad students?

3. One man brings a charge against a feminist professor known internationally for her path-breaking work. The man claims he has been forced by the professor to hang out with her, sit by her in her home, read to her and talk to her. The complaints pre-date their student/teacher relationship and go back to when he was a young man who bumped into her in a European capital. The charge is backed up by some flirtatious emails and has a he said/she said feel to it.

Should the university:

A. Fire her

B. Hire a publicist to broadcast the case internationally to show that feminists fuck up too and even more than anyone else does but that the university is willing to go to any lengths to protect its student/clients from feminists?

C. Tell her to marry the victim

D. Put her on leave without pay indefinitely

E. Lock her up in her university owned apartment and force her to hand out all of her intellectual property to the university while continuing to admit students to work with her and using her reputation as a lure for the program with which she is affiliated.

4. A queer person of color has been accused of engaging inappropriately with another queer person of his own age and status off campus. This person does not work with the alleged victim, does not supervise the alleged victim and has no further contact with them.

Should the university:

A. Fire them both?

B. Get rid of queer studies and Ethnic Studies and Black studies and feminist studies?

C. Hire some graduate students to post repeatedly about this case on social media to make something out of what could potentially have been nothing?

D. Deny them both tenure?

E. Set them up with a white guy mentor who can explain how this all works?

5. A man of color has been accused of sexually harassing a white student by being in the same room as her and looking at her in an “odd way.” The two never met out of the classroom but the student says she feels “unsafe.” You are the chairperson to whom the student reports this feeling. Do you:

A. Call the police.

B. Call the army?

C. Investigate to find out how and when and why a Black man was hired on your campus?

D. Contact the NYT?

E. Take out more insurance?

Section 3: Now that you have completed your training it is time to purchase your insurance. If you are a white guy – don’t worry, you are covered by our “male majority non-liability clause agreement.” If you are anyone else, the cost of coverage, if and only if you qualify for it, will be a third of your current salary but we offer you the chance to teach for the coverage by adding 2 extra classes per year to your work load. You will also be asked to pick up extra mentoring.

Finally, what is the take away here? Yes, pay to play! No bad universities, only bad faculty! One million years of patriarchal rule can’t be wrong!

Your mission, Tom Cruise, should you choose to accept it, is to self-destruct within 5 seconds of reading this message.

Oh, you did that already, several times, and in public, and on Oprah and in documentaries about the Fascist Church of Scientology. Still, please do it again and mean it this time. Consider all rumors about your homosexuality to be null and void, you are way too ordinary to be homosexual. Also, you dress badly. And, furthermore, pursuant to this message, you will no longer be a lesbian boy idol. Someone get the message to Ellen please.

As for your latest masterpiece, Mission Impossible 47, it sucks. FYI Tom, “masterpiece” is not a compliment, don’t get excited, definitely don’t start jumping around like a puppy on sofas the way you did when people had to hear about you kidnapping your last wife, Katie Holmes. Your new film sucks so bad, Tom, because we have to watch you supposedly saving the world from the bad guys. Who are the bad guys, Tom? Are they anarchists? Are they? Really? What? Do you know what anarchy is, what it means, what it stands for? Do you get that anarchists reject hierarchy, and property and believe in self-governance and call attention to abuses of state power? Do you know what you are Tom? You are a guy who jumps out of planes and thinks that this qualifies you to save the world. Do us a favor next time – how about don’t save us from the anarchists? Please.

Tom, Mission Impossible Fallout is a nonsense film with a nonsense title. The only fallout is the nuclear level stench that the film puts out as it tries to offer audiences clever twists and turns on a very bad plot. Oh, and you fall out of planes and helicopters a lot. Let’s think about the plot of this movie, Tom, and see together if we can understand where it falls out with even its own premises. Ok, bear with me Tom, there is a lot of summary here and I want you to follow along with me, focus…no stop looking around for someone who needs your help, I need your help, I need you to explain this nutso plot to me so that I can understand how and why in the age of renewed right wing populism and fascist patriarchy, anarchy becomes the problem afflicting what you like to call in this film “the world.”

OK, here we go, a summary: a rogue group of operatives (Tom, you played Ethan Hunt, right? A man who is both hunted, haunted and hunting…clever…and then there is Benji played by the desperately trying to be funny Simon Pegg, and Luther played by Ving Rhames, who, in this film is essentially a Black male punching bag whom you keep saving to prove your morality – so good of you to save the Black man when his role usually is to die off quickly and leave the white guys to save the world, but you saved him! Wow…deep). As I was saying Tom, look at me, as I was saying, you lead a group of rogue operatives known as the Impossible Missions Force as they try to prevent some bad anarchists from obtaining plutonium and using it to blow everyone up. The Impossible Missions Force…great name Tom…let’s shorten it to IMF to make it clear for whom you work. Do you know what the IMF is Tom? Ask Siri…no not your daughter, that’s Suri, although she probably knows the answer, Siri – Siri, what is IMF?

“Here’s what I found: IMF stands for the International Monetary Fund. The IMF promotes international financial stability and monetary cooperation. It also facilitates international trade, promotes employment and sustainable economic growth, and helps to reduce global poverty. The IMF is governed by and accountable to its 189 member countries.”

Sounds ok Tom, right? The IMF sounds like a good thing to you, maybe – reducing global poverty? Gooood. Sustainable economic growth? Gooood. Wrong, not good. The IMF basically allows wealthy countries to impose neoliberal capitalism on poor countries. The same countries responsible for creating shit shows in the global economy (think Germany) then gets to impose restrictions on bad “lazy” countries (think Greece). Not good, Tom, not good. So, you are the IMF and you work for the government? Sort of? Not sure, not really?

Who is the government in this film, Tom? Is it that Black CIA officer, Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), who keeps bugging you and following you and assigns to you a childminder by the name of Walker (played by a hunky Henry Cavill)? Or is the government Walker himself who is keeping tabs on you, but who is also a buff and better version of you and, just in case the audience ends up liking him better than you, is also ultimately revealed to be a loser anarchist??

Or is it Alec Baldwin’s character, Alan Hunley, your boss, who shows up to stop you from going rogue but then, twist after twist, ends up assisting you in going your own maverick way? Is he the government Tom? Is it the lady on the motorbike, Ilsa, who keeps hunting you (the hunter gets hunted) but always holds back from shooting you once you are in her sights? Is it the White Widow who seems to represent a shadowy terrorist group but actually turns out to be working with the CIA? But if Ilsa is the government, and so is the White Widow then who is the enemy? Is the government good or bad in this story Tom? No, don’t think about it, don’t look to your daughter Suri to help, even Siri is no use here. Simple question, is the government good or bad? If good, then why do you keep going rogue and why don’t they trust you? If bad, and you oppose them, and want to be free of their surveillance, and in fact want to go it alone on behalf of ‘freedom’ or some such vague concept, well, then in that case Tom, are you an anarchist? No, I know you are not a mutual aid anarchist or an anti-fascist anarchist, I mean duh! You are a scientologist and believe that you are a superior being in an inferior world (the plot of most Mission Impossible films). Obviously. But maybe you are a right-wing anarchist? Like Zizek? What’s that Tom? Oh, you LOVE Zizek, right, you have never heard of the IMF but you love Zizek, it is all making sense.

But wait, Tom, we have not finished the plot summary. So you are trying to stop the bad anarchists from dropping plutonium on the “world” which would create….fall out! And so, you need to impersonate one bad guy, John Lark and then kidnap another bad guy, Solomon Lane, and then hand him over to someone called the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby, last seen playing another royal – Princess Margaret and wasted here because there is no one to charm because Ethan Hunt is on a mission and has no time for tomfoolery). Luckily, the hunt for John Lark led us, Tom, to one of the very best scenes in the film (I hesitate to call it a film but it has a plot, was shot on some kind of digital equipment and trades in visual imagery that overwhelms its human accompaniments). Yes, the bathroom scene where you and that hunky Henry rough up an Asian dude in a bathroom stall and then when people enter the bathroom, you pretend to be having a threesome in the stall to avoid detection.

Niiiiiceee Tom! An arch little wink to the homo rumors that dog you (that we have declared null and void) and a postmodern moment of self-consciousness that allows us all a good giggle at the idea that you would ever masquerade as anything. Because that was the plan, right Tom, you were supposed to pretend to be John Lark and with some nifty face transferring technology, you would have gone undercover as the Asian guy. You would have fused with him, entered him, and all kinds of other metaphors for the sex you were pretending to have with him. Would you have been in yellow-face if you had actually followed through on this thoroughly racist premise? But you abandoned the whole idea pretty quickly Tom, not because of the racism but because, well you killed the guy. Dead guy, no face. Technically, of course, that was a “good” kill because he was the bad guy and you, you are so good you cannot even pretend to be bad. You are so original, you can only be you, right Tom?

Anyway, the plot thickens. Of course it does! You, being the very, very good guy that you are – we remember how you have already saved Ving Rhames several times by this point in the plot, you have killed several baddies, you consistently put your team first – overturn a plan (from the government? who is the government Tom, I know I keep asking) to kidnap the anarchist (and remind me again Tom what do they stand for?) that would result many deaths. Damn it Tom, you are SO good, you just keep saving and saving the world, one innocent at a time. I-am-so-moved. And now you must impersonate John Lark using face technology in order to meet up with more bad guys (who turn out to be the government in disguise, just saying Tom, confusing!)

Now, this face off technology is pretty cool Tom…were it not for the fact that it has been done to death in another film, what was it called…something catchy and clever…oh yeah, Face Off, ha, that’s good, another clever film featuring a white, pseudo-homosexual (we call them faux-mo’s Tom in case you need the correct lingo ever) who is a member of the Church of Scientology and thinks he is the bomb – wassisname? Oh right, John Travolta. Is this a metaphor for some kind of sex thing you guys do in the Church Of Scientology? Face off, jerk off, stare into the eyes of other alpha male members and their members, imagine your face in their face, your eyes in their eyes, your members for ever privately communing and confirming with their members in a members only bathroom stall? But needless to say, by the second or third time you used that technology in the film Tom, I was over it. So, when you left the naughty anarchist alone with Walker, told Walker to watch him and then it turned out that, oops, Walker and Lane were in cohoots and oops wait, Lane is not Lane but Benji with a new face and oops, Alex Baldwin is not the bad government rep but a good guy there to support you….wow, I just can’t. Way too much Deus Ex Machina shit here Tom…what? Deus Ex Machina, no it is not a church thing, it is a theater thing. It is the way stupid plot can be resolved when the author has painted himself into a corner – you just introduce a moment of technical wizardry that saves the day. Remember Finding Dory? No? With your friend Ellen in it? Nobody does, Tom. Sequels Tom, fear sequels. Anyway, Finding Dory keeps painting itself into a corner because Dory was a-dory-ble precisely because she kept forgetting everything and now she remembers everything so she needs new and interesting obstacles to overcome and new ways to overcome them. In this film, the resolution comes in the form of…wait for it….a smart octopus. No, Tom, I do not think you need to hire an octopus in your film. But you do need something.

How does Deus Ex Machina work in Mission Impossible 47?? It works through you, dude. You are the Deus Ex Machina Tom. Whenever the moronic mission takes a wrong turn, you arrive from above, from below, on a bike, in a plane, flying a helicopter, on a cliff, in a tunnel, with a gun, or your fists, on your knees or hanging from a rope, or a ledge, but you always make it, you always get the job done, often with only one second remaining and a bad guy still loose. You do it, and you do it again, you save the day.

And I have not even finished explaining your film to you Tom. Oh man, remember the good old days Tom, when you were just a young whipper snapper and you just wanted to have fun and and dance around in your underwear and when “risky business” meant crashing dad’s car not parachuting through a storm from 30,000 feet up? Remember back then – you still used allegorical names then – I think you played Joel Goodson…what’s that? Allegorical? Oh it just means, well, never mind Tom. I just meant that there is a pattern to your films. In fact, in Risky Business, there was also a queer theme – remember the transgender person you nearly had sex with in that film? Now that was a great film – white kid fucks up his parent’s house, gets into a relationship with a prostitute, ends up owing “bad” people money but at the end of day, still has a bright future and gets into Princeton. Wow, magic how that happens…for white boys. Now, that was your sweet spot, the cute story about innocent young white boys getting into trouble but always coming out on top! You had a good thing going Tommy boy, so why this nonsense about fighting anarchists and stopping the end of the world?

Back in the good old days, you did not have to think about the IMF, or ask who exactly represents the government, or figure out how to juggle three women in one film without having sex with any of them or sort through why your wives leave you, often under cover of night and with much planning. And now Tom? Now, as your church tries to figure out who you should marry next, as your bulked up mid-life crisis body begins to show signs of wear and tear, as your plots contain as many contradictions as a story about why three heterosexual guys were caught in a toilet stall together, now Tom, it is time to do the right thing.

What should you do Tom? Well, stop making these Mission Impossible films. Really stop it. But, second, if, like Samuel Beckett, you find that “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”…well, what? Who is Samuel Beckett, no he is not that Black action actor, that is Samuel Jackson, and no, Jackson is not available to play a support role in your next film, nor is Samuel Beckett. But as I was saying, if you find you must go on, here’s a plot for you: your shitty boss, Alex Baldwin’s character, has been sexually harassing the head of the CIA played by Angela Bassett, and blackmailing the White Widow and trying to kill Ilsa, all while stymying their promotions, taking responsibility for their work and ideas and making tons more money than them. You, in the meantime, have been luring international men of mystery into public bathrooms with hunky Henry. You are so busy that you fail to see all the angry women who are lining up to take down the IMF. When you finally emerge from the restroom, no longer even able to feel your face, not even knowing any longer if it is your real face, the women have formed a rogue group and teamed up with anarchist groups to bring down global capitalism, assassinate its leadership, redistribute wealth, make health care and child care free, put a cap on earnings, abolish inheritance (all money goes back into the system), abolish prisons, make university free, figured out how to pay teachers properly, get rid of lawyers, ended marriage, oh and stopped nuclear war. All that…while you were in the bathroom with the hunk.

But, if you really want to help people, and you really seem to want to, based upon all your Scientology videos, give your money away – some could go to Black Lives Matter to acknowledge that it is the police and not the anarchists who need to be stopped. More could go to various humanitarian crises in Syria, the Palestinian Territories, Indian occupied Kashmir and elsewhere (remember Kashmir Tom? You shot the last third of the movie there without mentioning its own ongoing struggle). More could go to help women and minorities make real films instead of these insanely expensive, sorry excuses for movies that you are involved in. You could endow a chair in sexuality studies somewhere so that people can study why people join pseudo churches to cover up whatever sexual secrets they have. You might consider funding a bunch of smart young, radical politicians to start a third party that would really go rogue in the US and would break with the super capitalism of Trump and would figure out how to redistribute wealth, how to hold banks and bankers accountable and how to rescue us from plutocratic democracy. Tell you what Tom, here’s an idea, you really can save us and the world. Take all of your wealthy friends in the 1% and put them in a helicopter – show them how to jump out with out a parachute, and if they resist, push them out. We will call it Mission Possible – Push Out and our world won’t end, but yours will. What’s that? You’ll do it if you can be reinstated as a lesbian boy idol? Ok, I will talk to Ellen and see what I can do.

Crisis upon crisis, we are living in a storm of epic and growing proportions. Every day a new travesty of justice, a new police-authored crime, a new violent executive order is issued on behalf of those who have everything and against the many who are divided and conquered. In this new era, one characterized by a violent, indeed vertiginous, form of capitalism in which all tools levied against the regime are re-appropriated and turned back upon us, it is urgent that we take aim at and demolish the “everything” that Trumpian masters of finance come to take. We must tear down not only the monuments and the fabricated past for which they stand but also the legal, political and social mechanisms that were supposed to provide shelter to the weak but that in the wrong hands become new weapons in the war on everyone. A world of rich elites arrayed against multitudes requires new tactics, new articulations of old problems and a willingness to risk all.

In the spirit of risk, on behalf of demolition and in a world where everyone should be opposed to everything, we would do well to revisit Audre Lorde’s famous maxim from 1984 about the master’s tools and the master’s house and in so doing we should remember her main goal – it was not only to create a debate about which tools to use, it was to argue for the demolition itself with purpose and without a chance of reconstruction.

1. The Master’s Screwdriver

In the speech in which Audre Lorde originally used the term “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” she did so not only to critique patriarchy but also to take aim at what she called “racist feminism.” Pointing to the fact that she was often called to attend feminist conferences as a woman of color and appeared alone among white women who had hired women of color to take care of their kids while they were at the conference, she commented: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

This signature phrase from Lorde, who was fond of scolding white feminists (who were fond of being scolded), reminds us that there is never only one enemy – there is an obvious group of people who benefit from the status quo but then there is an entire support system for that group who ensure that relations of reward and punishment stay firmly in place. From Lorde’s vantage point, as a Black lesbian in the fraught middle years of so called second wave feminism, the enemies were certainly white men but they were also the multitudes of white women who supported these men, who cleaned up for them and who actively sustained the racial and capitalist hierarchy from which they benefitted.

Lorde’s wise words were never so appropriate as now, an era in which white patriarchy has made a stupefying comeback and at a time when opposition to capitalism and patriarchy, white supremacy and xenophobia all too often uses the wrong tools to fight the power. For example, while we seem to be as invested as 1970’s and 1980’s feminists were in identifying, exposing and disrupting the quotidian mechanisms of white patriarchy, we still went with a hegemonic strategy of supporting a corporate woman in the last election (Hilary Clinton) to oppose Trump rather than finding a truly radical candidate (hello Alexandra Ocasio Cortez!). And of course, white patriarchy still relies upon on the support of white heterosexual women who helped to elect our current sexist in chief.

But, as in Lorde’s moment, the enemy is not just the abusive male, however powerful and overtly obnoxious he may be; as it was then, the problem is structural and lies within a system that allows the crimes of the white guy to rebound onto others while our hero sits high above the fray in the (Trump) tower he has built for just such occasions. And while the numerous stories of sexual abuse, the deportation of children and financial exploitation pouring into the public sphere should be enough to bring the master’s house down, because they continue to use the master’s tools of sex negativity, racism, and the doubling down on an unstable and deeply unfair real estate market, the house still stands. The vertiginous turn of the screw here ensures that the more things change, the more the rich stay rich and everyone else gets screwed.

2. The Master’s Power Drill

When we spin too fast and gather speed using the master’s power drills (the law, systems of punishment, impunity for the rich), we often create gaping holes in the system, but we often also fall into them! There are many versions of this process in the world around us and so we can name our era one of vertiginous capital – an era in which things move too fast for us to properly identify the systems of oppression that hold us and twist our own strategies of resistance back upon ourselves at the same time.

Examples:

• We live in an era of big data with supposedly superhuman, literally, powers of prediction and speculation. Massive amounts of data are collected from each of us every day and yet, despite all that, we were unable to predict or prevent the rise of Trump. We could not even predict his electoral win and until the moment that the first few states reported the voting results, media organs like CNN and the NYT showed Trump as having the longest shot ever for President. And yet here we are.

• We live in an era when Gender Studies has been institutionalized but only as a place to study the master’s house – how it was built, what materials it is made of and what abuses it contains. The site of knowledge production that should be committed to tearing the house down, becomes the safe house for accusations against previous owners; indeed, gender studies is now the house of trigger warnings where the very materials about sexual abuse and violence that we fought for the right to teach just a generation ago can now not be mentioned in case they trigger a concealed site of trauma. As a consequence of using the master’s tools, the university’s anachronistic division of knowledge holds firm, the disciplines thrive and hog all the resources and instead of seeing male bodied people learning to be feminists in gender studies classrooms, and female bodied people in STEM classes, gender studies remains a site populated by women, science classrooms remain male dominated and the beat goes on.

• We live in an era of epic homelessness and we see tent cities springing up in high rent cities around the world. Vast numbers of people in first world countries live on the streets and every day another family fails to pay exorbitant rent for another rubbish apartment and ends up on the streets with no social safety nets to hold them. And so, we speak of a homeless problem when we actually have a homefulness problem in which too few people own too many properties and leave them empty or put them up for rent on the gentrified market of temporary luxury housing. Tent cities abound as do zombie buildings of luxury apartments from New York City to Shanghai, from Vancouver to San Francisco, from London to Sentosa Island in Singapore. All over the world, millions of apartments sit completely empty and millions of people live in the streets. In the 1970’s and 1980’s punks and anarchists squatted in abandoned buildings giving them new purpose and making space for public sex (the piers), collective life and radical queer politics (the Brixton Fairies). But in the era of home security and CCTV, traditional forms of squatting in buildings is nigh on impossible. And so the squat moves from inside the building to the street. Tent cities are the exact opposite of the master’s house. While gentrification and home improvement and the pretense of sharing a la Airbnb deploys the master’s tool of real estate speculation, the tents represent new forms of squatting. And as such, they remake the relations between inside and outside, legal and moral, shelter and property.

• We live in a world where instead of trying to replace the masters who exploit us, we seek to become them in small and meaningless ways. Take the new electronic “assistants” that people use to embellish the stupor and inertia of their domestic worlds. Hey Google, Alexa, Echo and Siri are electronic switch points between us and our home systems – Hey Google, turn off the lights! Siri – reserve me a table! Echo, change the channel. These devices give us the illusion that we too have personal assistants, better known as servants, and that we can outsource our labor to these helpers. The promise of technology of course was that repetitive labor could be automated and new relations to work and liberation might emerge. But in the era of vertiginous capital, the devices that are supposed to save us – washing machines and vacuum cleaners in the 1950’s, electronic assistants today, represent not liberation but new forms of prosthetic power.

Paul Preciado has identified prosthetic power as part of a post-war, post-natural mania for technologies of convenience that tether the body to new forms of rule. While the white, middle-class domestic household has been the primary location of prosthetic rule, queer bodies represent counter-productive opportunities for a new order reimagined around the queer body.

Preciado’s narrative of post-natural power is the dildo bearing butch who wields a prosthetic device of his own making against the domestic prosthetics of heteronormativity. And like the Barbie Liberation Organization of the 1990’s who switched out the voice boxes of Ken and Barbie dolls so that they would say things like “Vengeance is mine!” our new electronic Preciado’s narrative of post-natural power is the dildo bearing butch who wields a prosthetic device of his own making against the domestic prosthetics of heteronormativity. And like the Barbie Liberation Organization of the 1990’s who switched out the voice boxes of Ken and Barbie dolls so that they would say things like “Vengeance is mine!” our new electronic devices are in need of a countersexual hack. Once hacked, these prosthetic helpers will have to do much more than turn security systems on and off, they will be programmed to respond to real demands and actual questions: Hey Google, smash the patriarchy! Echo, remove President Trump! Siri, what the fuck is going on? Alexa, pass me a battle axe!

So, let’s recap, using the master’s power drill, a tool that spins so fast that the hole it is drilling becomes a vacuum sucking down all opposition, we turn the problem into the solution: big data without predictive powers results in renewed calls for more data to improve accuracy next time; a reckoning with patriarchal sexism and sexual harassment has now turned its focus upon queers and people of color; electronic assistants offer an illusion of automation while leaving labor relations intact; homefulness problems result in tent cities and home sharing apps like Airbnb give the illusion of a mutual economy while sucking the rental market dry. We must wield our own dildonic prosthetics against the master’s drill, fight the viagra sustained power tool with prosthetic imaginaries!

3.The Master’s Hammer

Speaking of prosthetic imaginaries, is there a feminist hammer? Or is the hammer just another master’s tool? Sara Ahmed believes the hammer could be used as part of an effort to name what afflicts us, to identify the enemy and in so doing to direct our energies with more precision. She writes: “having names for problems can make a difference. Before, you could not quite put your finger on it. With these words as tools, we revisit our own histories; we hammer away at the past.” But, she also goes on to propose that within the system that we live, by talking about a problem, you become the problem!

#Metoo and #Timesup have picked up the hammer of social media and they are using it, all too often, to hammer in the morning and to hammer in the evening and to hammer all over the land. The hammering that Peter Seeger and Lee Hays had in mind in their song “If I had a Hammer” concerned a social reckoning with racial and class inequality and indeed they first performed the song at a dinner held in support of arrested American Communist leaders. The #metoo and #timesup hammers however all too often single out sexual assault from all kinds of other forms of abuse.

Indeed, the hammer of social media has the effect of flattening out the terrain of social difference so that all offenses become one, a forced kiss gets hammered along with a rape, years of abuse are treated the same way as an ill-judged pass. For this reason, rather than a moment of reckoning for white men in relation to the women they have abused and the violence they have unleashed, much of the impact of #metoo and #timesup has, as Martha Gessen pointed out early on, resulted in a full-fledged sex panic within which the hammer of moral accusation is brought down all too often by white women upon men of color and by straight people upon queers. Now, while of course there is no doubt that plenty of men of color and some queers have behaved as badly as the legions of others, and while many women of color actively oppose patriarchal systems extended by men of color, we have the mechanisms in place from years of institutionalized racism and homophobia to go after the men of color and the queers and so that is exactly what is happening.

Let’s take a look at one vertiginous loop characteristic of so many others when we try to hammer out the truth and consequences of sexual harassment. In academia today, under new Title 9 regulations, we are regularly being beaten at our own game. There are now numerous cases on college campuses across the country of women and queer faculty accused of sexual harassment and facing charges. For the last fifty years, white male faculty have groomed, dated, screwed and married their graduate students. And many more have simply harassed and assaulted the women under their mentorship. Take, for example, the case of George Tyndall, a white gynecologist at USC who was accused of multiple forms of abuse over several decades.

Despite endless public campaigns against pedophiles and sex criminals in the US, this white guy was allowed to continue touching young women inappropriately with impunity for years! And it is not as if women did not complain; quite simply, the complaints from the women concerned never led to any consequences for Tyndall. When USC was finally pressured to act by the threat of exposure, it moved decisively to protect its endowment rather than its students, staff, and faculty. The story was buried and Tyndall took a nice retirement package and rode off into the sunset. Tyndall and other white male abusers are not the people upon whom the hammer comes down. Instead, women and queers of color at other universities have been placed on administrative leave with half pay for some vague accusations of inappropriate contact with students, none of which involved physical contact!

The case of Junot Diaz provides another cautionary tale about hammering people on social media. Diaz was accused of forcible kissing by one woman and of raising his voice at another woman at a conference. Here, the judgement was swift and decisive on social media even though some of the accusations leveled at Diaz, according to the Boston Globe, proved to be untrue. And this is not at all to say that Diaz has not behaved badly or that men of color accused of piggish behavior are not guilty of abuse, assault, public performances of sexism and much worse; it is only to point to the long history of hammering men of color for sex crimes in the US, while white men, the benefactors of vertiginous capital and the operators of the tools of discipline and punishment, protect the money which in turn protects them.

If this sounds like hyperbole, consider a final example – the case of Jimmy Savile, a British media darling of the late 20th century who was also a well-known pedophile and serial abuser of the boys and girls who made up his audience.

Jimmy Savile – DJ, Media Celebrity, Pedophile

Jimmy Savile was accused after his death in 2011 of multiple counts of pedophilia. There are now reports that estimate that he abused over 500 young girls and boys, sometimes through his philanthropic work in hospitals! But, while Savile died a good death, not openly accused of anything during his lifetime despite numerous whisper campaigns about his misconduct, England quickly and decisively turned a few months later to the “real crime” of a Pakistani pedophile ring and arrested and convicted seven British-Asian men.

This is business as usual and not at all the conclusion to patriarchy that was promised – this conclusion indeed comes with a whimper and the only bang is the sound of the master’s hammer as it batters resistance by turning the victim of one system (racism) into the criminal in another (sex abuse).

4. The Master’s House

“Splitting,” (1974) by Gordon Matta Clark, Anarchitect

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” diagnoses perfectly our current predicament as we are pulled by the motion of vertiginous capital into a sinkhole of our own making, trying to claw our way out with the same methods that created the whirlwind in the first place. It is clear by now that you cannot resolve sexual assault with more criminalization, or the abjection of queers with marriage, or wealth disparity with real estate transactions. We cannot end sexual harassment on campus by throwing such a wide net that the predators wriggle free through loopholes of their own making while women and queers stand accused of unnatural, inappropriate and criminal conduct. It is clear that the moral policing we have engaged in the hopes of tackling heteropatriarchal abuses has come back around and now accuses us of misconduct. And so, it is time for new tactics: fewer strategies of repair and more damage to the system; less fixing up and more taking down; fewer victims and more fighters.

Grace Jones, “Demolition Man,” (1981)

We are here, after all, not to redesign or fix up the master’s house despite the multiple shows on TV telling us how to do it. We are here, as anarchitects in the tradition of Gordon Matta-Clark, to tear the whole fucking structure down! It is time for demolition. It is time for Grace Jones. Jones had the right idea as usual in 1981 when she called for the “Demolition Man,” who turned out to be Black queer and dangerous:

I’m a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom,
I kill conversation as I walk into the room,
I’m a three line whip,
I’m the sort of thing they ban,
I’m a walking disaster,
I’m a demolition man,
Demolition man…

We must all become walking nightmares, arsenals of doom, walking disasters, walking dead, here not to demand recognition, not to ask for justice from the same system that criminalized us or ask for a new leader to be delivered by the same process that gave us the Clintons and Trump. We come bearing new weapons, dildonic tools of the countersexual underground, new hacks of old systems, we come to blow the house down. It is time to turn to the language of unmaking, unbuilding, undoing while refusing the vertiginous capital techniques of litigious accusation and criminalization. Tear it all down!

Reading over the dirty details of the exploits of scumbag of the month, Harvey Weinstein, one thought occurred to me over and over: something is rotten in the state of heterosexuality. And yet, in all the masses of media coverage on Weinstein’s disgusting behaviors, I barely remember seeing the word! Believe me that I am not one to argue that gays are innocent by comparison, only that the “#me too” twitter campaigns and the national discussion of enforced blowjobs and massages seems, for the moment to be focused upon powerful men forcing young women into compromising positions. Shouldn’t this be the beginning of a widespread conversation about men, women and sex? And should we be all thumbing through our old copies of Catherine MacKinnon and wondering whether in fact she was on to something when she wrote: “male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting”? While we might want to hesitate before tarring all men with the same brush of sexual harassment, nonetheless, the exposure of widespread instances of harassment accompanied by extensive cover-ups, facilitation and pay offs has certainly raised again questions about male power and female victimization.

So, how would a national conversation on heterosexuality need to begin? Well, for once, we would need to name a power dynamic for what it is. Just as the popular press has tended, until very recently, to shy away from calling the racial context in which police officers beat and shoot Black men white supremacy, so they hesitate to call the sexual context in which powerful and famous men cajole, nudge, push, shove, forcibly manipulate often young and inexperienced women to sexually please them, hetero-patriarchy. But this is what it is and this is the atmosphere in which many young men are trained to understand themselves as extremely desirable while young women struggle with their self-image. Rather than wagging our collective fingers at a Wiener, a Weinstein, a wanker or worse, we need to turn to the way we raise young men to believe that if they want it, she does too…or even, if they want it, it does not matter what she wants. But we should also be thinking about how we raise young women to comply and about what happens when women say enough is enough.

The climate on college campuses recently is representative of the confusion some young women and men have about the meaning of heterosexuality, its rituals and its rules. Many express confusion mixed with outrage, fear, paranoia and anger. Students and professors launch sexual harassment charges at one another, and while some big name professors who are serial abusers have been caught pressuring their students and face charges, the latitude of the Title IX regulations have also been used for homophobic purposes. And so, in at least three cases that I know of personally, queer and trans faculty have been accused of “improper conduct,” or “inappropriate boundaries” with students. In one case, a queer/trans couple of color have been suspended with a reduction in pay! Perhaps on account of our reluctance to have a national conversation about heterosexuality and its abuses, Title IX regulations designed to protect students from quid pro quo scenarios have led instead to increased surveillance of queer and trans faculty.

As shocked as we all may be about the stories about Weinstein, in their sheer repetitiveness and consistency, they must be read as totally normal. Weinstein, obviously, is only the tip of a very large and very nasty Hollywood iceberg. Despite Hollywood’s own thematization of the sexual casting couch – how many films are about feisty women who are asked to sexually compromise their integrity for a job but refuse to? – it is a theme in Hollywood films because it is obviously one actual route to visibility and jobs. In fact, there is a kind of tautology to Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie coming out, long after the fact, and saying “me too.” Of course they were victims of the casting couch, their fame may tell us as much! And I am not saying that successful female stars only got where they are today because they succumbed to Weinstein or his equivalent at other studios, but I am saying that there are probably countless other actresses who never made it big precisely because they did say no. Weinstein implies as much in case after case reported by The New Yorker. When women pushed back or refused him what he felt was his sexual due, they were told, as Lupita Nyong’o bravely reported, that this would cost them in their careers.

Newton’s third law states: for every action, there is an equal and opposition reaction. So, a bird can fly because its wing motions force air down and are met by the force of the air pushing it up – flight depends upon the relations between actions and reactions. For every lewd guy who sidles up to a woman and whispers inane nothings in her ear in the hopes of seducing or forcing her into bed, there must be among all the women he approaches at least one who hears his spiel as seductive. If only every woman who ever came into contact with the bulk and force of Weinstein’s body said, as Lupita Nyong’o did: “With all due respect, I would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking, so I must pass.”

Sex is like Newton’s third law – it depends upon actions and reactions. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This could be a definition of heterosexuality.

This is certainly one of the ways in which we have thought about heterosexuality – as in “opposites attract,” or “women are from Venus and men are from Mar,” or, in the immortal words of Paula Abdul: “Baby seems we never ever agree/You like the movies/And I like T.V./I take things serious/And you take ’em light/I go to bed early/And you party all night.” You say potato and I say potarto, let’s call the whole thing off. Heterosexuality has been cast in art and in science, for better or for worse, as a détente between different species. She wants monogamy and stability, he wants to spread his seed far and wide. He wants quantity, she wants quality. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But, here’s the rub for heterosexuality – for a culture invested in the idea of men and women as “opposites,” it takes a major and continuous PR campaign to make heterosexuality seem natural, normal and even appealing.

In her engaging book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (2012), Hanna Blank explains how heterosexuality became synonymous with sexual normativity. She writes: “Early in the history of the term, it was even used interchangeably with the term “normal-sexual.” Over time, of course, norms shift and change but in this day and at this moment we should be clear about what norm heterosexuality names: what is normal apparently between particularly white men and women is for white men to see women as toys, accessories, playmates and trophies. What is normal for women is to react to a range of behaviors from boyfriends, fathers, uncles and family friends that slide back and forth between flirtation, seduction and abuse. The “me too” hashtag that went viral on twitter recently suggests that much of the attention directed at women by powerful white men slides quickly from seduction into abuse and that this has been so normalized that women have accepted that slide as part and parcel of heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is the normalization of abuse.

Obviously not all heterosexual relations are abusive. Not all powerful white men are abusers. Not all women have been sexually assaulted. And so on. But, as Jenny Holzer once wrote with admirable and characteristic economy, “abuse of power comes as no surprise.” We live in a world, as Sara Ahmed reminds us in Living A Feminist Life, built by and for white men. For this reason, she proposes, white men fit well in the world they have built and all other bodies have to struggle to find their place. The winner takes all mentality of white supremacy has organized the expectations of generations of young men and women such that white men expect the world and women are expected to deliver it to them. When those deliveries halt or slow down or are interrupted, the white man feels that he has been deprived of something he was promised. In the world that the white man built, a world where he has authorized his own violent reactions to disappointments, he now legally buys a gun and legally walks through the streets with that gun and waits for the moment within which he will use that gun to remind everyone around him that this is his world and we will live and die in it.

It is time to confront the normalization of abuse under the heading of heterosexuality. It is time to think about the violence of the norm, the way in which norms are self-perpetuating and the possibility that white male violence continues because some (white) women succumb to it, consent to it, extend it. Trump after all, after decades of Wiener/Weinstein/wanker like behavior, after extended publicity on his violent rhetoric and actions towards women, was elected with considerable help from white women voters. And for every Lupita Nyong’o who says unequivocally no to a pig like Weinstein, there are 10 others who either felt they could not say no or decided it was easier and more beneficial to their careers to say yes. Heterosexuality is a candle burning at both ends. For the casual violence that it masks to be confronted in a structural way and not in the piecemeal and potentially homophobic ways that Title IX regulations currently oversee, we need to confront heterosexuality head on. Heterosexuality promotes, depends upon and perpetuates gendered hierarchies, sexual assault and the suppression of feminine people. Heterosexuality, indeed, is not the other to homosexuality, it is the other to social justice, a politics of pleasure, a funky and open relation to sex in which we care whether our partners are awake and responsive versus drunk and inert, ready and willing versus resigned and submissive, excited and aroused versus disgusted and fleeing.

To all the Wieners, Weinsteins and Wankers out there: your days are numbered, your gig is up. Your disdain for women, people of color and the many who work for you is building towards an inevitable reversal in which you will no longer be the predator out on the prowl; in the immortal words of Grace Jones, we are approaching the moment when the hunter gets captured by the game. Get ready!

For those of you young enough to associate the term Amazon only with the corporate giant that slew the bookstores and sold the world, the new Wonder Woman movie may not evoke any earlier lesbian or feminist associations. But for people who still remember certain strands of lesbian feminism from the 1970’s, the term Amazon conjures fierce, one-breasted women who lived without men and who fought, hunted, made war and love and generally embodied a utopian feminist past. And while the Amazons so beloved of lesbian feminists tended to be figured as white, others may make connections to the Dahomey Amazons – not mythological figures at all but an all female military regiment started by the third King of Dahomey in the 17th century. These Black Amazons held political power and trained for war and were only disbanded when Dahomey became a French protectorate.

Seh-Dong-Hong Beh, a leader of the Amazons of Dahomey

The now much maligned Michigan Women’s Music Festival used to open and close every year with a group rendition of Maxine Feldman’s “Amazon” (“Amazon women rise, Amazon women weaving rainbows in the skies. Amazon women fly, Amazon women fly!”) And Feldman left no doubt as to what she meant by Amazon: “I am and once was called Amazon, now I am called lesbian!” That is clearly not the meaning of Amazon in the new Wonder Woman movie and indeed the Diana Prince who leaves Themyscira for London is no Dahomey style man-killer. She does not come to bury patriarchy, she just wants her place at the table. Indeed, our era’s Wonder Woman spends more time ‘leaning in’ than leaning on the bad guys.

Leaning in?

Too bad, because I had very high hopes for Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Jenkins, after all, made the fantastic Monster in 2003 starring Charlize Theron as famed rape revenge serial killer, Aileen Wuornos. And Wonder Woman as a character and a comic book hero has a long and colorful origin story that stretches back through early suffragettes, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and a domestic triangle involving psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and his student/lover Olive Byrne (also Sanger’s niece). None of these details make their way into Jenkins’ superhero movie, alas, and instead we get a competent, conventional blockbuster with an alluring lead actress and long drawn out action sequences punctuated by a few moments of humor, a few leaden speeches and a rewritten version of World War One!

William Marston with both of his female partners (Olive Byrne in white and Elizabeth Holloway in the right hand corner) and their four children.

The Wonder Woman of the comic books from the 1940’s was a social justice figure – she opposed male dominance; she defeated the Nazis; she rescued people; and in one issue, she ran for president. In Patty Jenkins’ film, a blockbuster angling for franchise status and no doubt timed to coincide with what most people thought would be the first female presidency in the US, Wonder Woman is a romantic heroine, looking for a mate and fighting baddies along the way. For those who are so inclined, one could even read a Zionist narrative into Jenkins’ film given that Diana Prince is played by Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, and former Miss Israel, who credits her time spent in the Israeli Defense Forces for her winning the part of Gisele in the Fast and Furious franchise. Her military expertise is fully on show in Wonder Woman. Also, Jenkins’ Wonder Woman moves the comic book narrative setting of World War 2 to World War 1, probably because an Israeli actress fighting Nazi’s in World War 2 would require some kind of discourse on the Holocaust!

The Germans are still the bad guys in this version and actually the first time Diana meets Steve Trevor he is wearing a German uniform for disguise and the Amazons ask him how they are supposed to tell the difference between him and the enemy. Good question! And would that the film had followed up on this Amazonian instinct that wars pit one form of violent and racist nationalism against another…but we lose sight of any kind of critique quickly as a heteropornographic conceit takes over in which a lovely woman has been stranded in an asexual community of women and then spies a naked man for the first time. After some banter about whether the naked Steve is a worthy representative of the male species, Diana Prince begins the inevitable fall into the sloppy clichés of hetero romance accompanied by bottom-feeding lines like: “It’s about what you believe. And I believe in love. Only love will truly save the world.”

“Men are essential for procreation but when it comes to pleasure, unnecessary.”

This is all very disappointing, if only because Wonder Woman began promisingly enough with scenes of Diana’s childhood in Themyscira: this was women-only territory and the women were training for war. In Amazon territory, viewers are treated to some bona-fide female muscularity in the form of Robin Wright, who plays Diana’s aunt, Antiope, and there are even quick explanations for the absence of men – “men are essential for procreation but when it comes to pleasure, unnecessary.” Once she leaves her Amazonian isle, Diana is plucky and feisty enough and she quickly lets Steve Trevor know “what I do is not up to you.” She consistently out thinks, out fights and out runs him and he underestimates her at his peril. But his presence is intended to snuff out any fantasies of Amazonian love between women.

Perhaps Patty Jenkins should have made the Wonder Woman film a narrative nested in the far more interesting story about the polyamorous threesome of Marston, Holloway and Byrne who, together, coproduced the fantasy that finally made it to the pages of DC comics. Jill Lepore, in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, tells this story with verve and skill and she untangles this history from a straightforward account of comics and locates the emergence of Wonder Woman firmly within a scene of sexual experimentation, security porn and suffragette feminism! According to Lepore, Marston, who is also credited with the invention of the lie detector, first married a lawyer, Elizabeth Holloway, and then fell in love with his student, the boyish Olive Byrne. The three lived together and shared household intimacies, chores and inspiration and they had four children together. After Marston’s death, the two women continued to live together, suggesting that the intimacy was not simply an extended three way in which the women shared the man. Olive was the niece of the great suffragist and early feminist Margaret Sanger and it was she who brought Sanger’s activism and writings to Marston’s attention. Much of Sanger’s work fueled Marston’s imagination when, later in life, he was hired to create a female superhero for DC comics. According to Lepore: Marston’s comic, was meant to chronicle what he called “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women.”

Marston’s Wonder Woman was fiercely feminist. She was bold and strong if also limited and liberal (she believes in “truth” after all!). But the Wonder Woman that he and Byrne and Holloway birthed was sexually inventive and gave voice to a kind of lusty relation to life, love and romance – romance for her often involved inverted gender roles, light bondage and a casual relation to violence. Many of the Wonder Woman stories played out Marston’s ideas about the power of men submitting to women and there was a non-exclusive representation of heterosexuality capacious enough to allow for a frisson between Diana Prince and her Amazonian sisterhood. Power dynamics, in the Wonder Woman comics, were full of eros and like Marston and Byrne, student-teacher dynamics were avowedly erotic rather than sources of anxiety and concern. Wonder Woman was a utopian who believed in a world made lousy by men and a potential world in which women kept everything in check.

That the power of women might be linked to lesbianism is not a hidden theme in Wonder Woman. According to Jill Lepore and others, lesbianism was always a clear part of the narrative. Indeed, conservatives railed against both Batman and Wonder Women in the 1950’s on account of the clear implications of a gay relationship between Batman and Robin and the obvious association between Diana Prince and lesbianism. Most accounts of the comic book character refer to her as bisexual. And yet, in the 2017 movie, in an era of gay marriage and public recognition of LGT families, the plot makes no nod to Sapphic love at all! Indeed, Diana Prince only comes to life when she meets Steve Trevor, leaves the island and begins a romantic flirtation with him. He even names her, for god’s sake, when he cuts her off as she is explaining to a military man in London that she is Princess of Themyscira. She gets only as far as “Prince…” when Steve interrupts and says “Prince, Diana Prince…” She also gets her “love conquers all” and “only believe” lines from Steve and the film suggests that after Steve is gone, she still believes he will return to her. Diana’s relations to women are firmly situated in a mythic past and they are all firmly situated as kin rather than love interests.

While the Wonder Woman of the early years of comics regularly rescued her mates, now she relies upon them to do the heavy lifting. The female super hero who carried men to safety and punctuated many a particularly gnarly situation with pithy catch phrases – “suffering Sappho” but also “great Hera!” and “Athena’s shield! – is nowhere to be found in 2017, in a future world that early Wonder Woman could never have been pessimistic enough to predict. So, what is a contemporary Wonder Woman to do? Too queer for Hollywood, too powerful for male pornographic gazes, too militaristic for feminists, too feminist for Christians (probably too Jewish for Christians in the latest incarnation), too dangerous and castrating to be victim to Trump-like pussy grabbing activity, but too liberal to lead a freedom fight. While Wonder Woman in the past, and definitely in Marston’s version, strongly embodied the feminist aspirations and struggles of the day, does she represent any kind of feminism now?

Marston’s Wonder Woman might be bewildered by the marketplace of ideas about feminism now and might not be sure whether she is a feminist or not, or what feminism even means in an era when Ivanka Trump, Angela Merkel and Cheryl Sandberg represent female accomplishment! Diana Prince is certainly no corporate feminist asking for a seat at the table; but nor is she simply Roxanne Gay’s “bad feminist” in the sense of finding herself outside its logic. Is she the womanist feminist of 1970’s radical feminism? A lesbian separatist stranded outside the Michigan Women’s Music Festival? Or is she the anarcho-feminist from my Gaga Feminism? Could she be the central character, with her raised fist and willful arm, of Sara Ahmed’s powerful polemic: Living a Feminist Life (Duke UP, 2017)? And will contemporary young feminists embrace the 1940’s Wonder Woman or ask for a trigger warning in relation to her preference for militaristic solutions to political problems?

To take just one of these options, Sara Ahmed’s sense of a “feminist life,” we might find only a very rough fit between Ahmed’s principles and Wonder Woman’s proto-feminism. And at certain points, they would have to part ways. Sara Ahmed’s book was written in the wake of her decision to leave Goldsmith, a hard decision that she made, as she puts it, “after three years of working with others to challenge how sexual harassment has become normalized in academic culture.” Deciding to give up the institutional life with its tendency to provide brick walls for us to knock our heads against in favor of a feminist life, Ahmed returns to the work of philosopher Marilyn Fry, Black feminists bell hooks and Audre Lorde and other thinkers often associated with 1970’s and 1980’s radical feminism and even argues that “we need a revival of lesbian feminism.” This return has Amazonian potential as does the book’s embrace of willfulness and killjoy tendencies. Reviving the call to see the personal as political, Ahmed quotes Fry’s notion of “lived theory” and even flirts with her separatist orientations (Ahmed declines to quote white men in this book).

But, Ahmed also positions feminism as an “archive of fragility” – she defines fragility as “the quality of being easily breakable” and feminism as “self-breakage” and a feminist politics of fragility as a model of “not only how to survive what we come up against but how to enable relationships to endure that can be easily threatened by what we come up against.” This fragile feminism has little room for a bondage-oriented super hero committed to fighting evil men in hand to hand combat (although Ahmed does conjure the image of a feminist army!). Ahmed’s book is beautiful in places, profound in others and it ricochets between pure anger, despair and a poetic conjuring of the inevitability of miscommunication, and the futility of institutional routes to multiracial and non-sexist education.

But ultimately Ahmed’s return to lesbian feminism, the reclaiming of the kill joy is not as inclusive as Ahmed makes it sound and despite reaching out to trans women with the definition of womanhood as “all who travel under the sign women,” the history of lesbian feminism that she draws upon is the exact history of feminism that made transwomen unwelcome in the first place! And the connection between feminism and fragility, along with Ahmed’s sympathy for trigger warnings and calls for safe space, and never mind her warning that humor “is a crucial technique for reproducing inequality and injustice” might ultimately leave readers with a depressive version of feminism – one that precisely lacks joy, pleasure and sex.

Wonder Woman, might balk at having to understand herself a part of what Ahmed calls a “fragile archive,” a record of the many slights and wounds that female-bodied people are dealt in a male-centric world. In Ahmed’s world, Diana Prince would not have much recourse to humor and she might have to issue a few trigger warnings before seriously kicking some patriarchal ass. Wonder Woman would be inclusive of trans women but she would ultimately have her fist in the air for safe spaces, sensitive students who are used and abused and a kind of femininity that does not want to hear about the erotics of bondage.

Likely Ahmed would not accept Wonder Woman as a symbol of the “feminist life.” But if we return to the Black Amazons of Dahomey, we can find a better image for her book and for some compromise between the tough, gnarly, intersectional feminism that she offers us and the anarchic power of the super hero. Fortunately, Wonder Woman had a much more interesting twin sister – Nubia – a Black super hero sculpted from dark clay while Wonder Woman was sculpted from light clay by their mother! When the two meet, in a volume of Wonder Woman comics from January 1973, they engage in woman to woman combat – Nubia wins but does not kill Diana, instead she claims the title of the Real Wonder Woman and the two unite to defeat Mars. In another issue, Diana is battling to “free the women of Africa.” This is laughable when we remember the Dahomey militias, and luckily Nubia steps in to save “the women of Africa” from the promised emancipation at the hands of a white hero, and she gives Diana a lesson in anti-colonial struggle.

We might hope for some future Wonder Woman movies that hew more closely to the spirit of the original Wonder Woman than Pattie Jenkins’ safe and genre conforming film. Supposedly something is in the works about Marston, Holloway and Byrne and there are also rumors of a Nubia film with squabbles online about whether Nubia should be played by Serena Williams! Either of these has more potential to tap into super-heroic feminist powers than the film we have been given in 2017, a time when a few violent women willing to put male “heroes” in their place while fighting for justice could go a long way. If someone is sharpening her pencil and readying to write/draw an episode of Wonder Woman in which both Wonder Women – Diana Prince and Nubia – or even a multi-racial coalition of trans* Wonder Women are gearing up to fight an evil Overlord with yellow hair, tiny hands and an even tinier vocabulary, let me know. And when they are finished with him, how about fighting a host of Overlords like Google, Uber, Whole Foods and others and taking back the term Amazon for more righteous and queer utopian freedom dreams?

At the end of a year in which men behaved badly, madly, and even gladly, how appropriate that an Oscar contending film appears in which men behave, yup, sadly. Indeed all the ladly behaviors that make up the repertoire of white masculinity have culminated in this – a film where we finally understand why the white man is sad, why everyone else is bad and why despite being sad because everyone else is bad, he learns to be a dad.

Manchester by The Sea (directed by Kenneth Lonergan) is a self-indulgent but pretty picture in which Affleck the Younger, Casey that is, mopes around for a full hour onscreen before we understand that something terrible has happened to him. His brother dies but that barely merits a tear from our sad sack chap. So could it be that he has a really bad job as a handy man that puts him in the way of verbal abuse from women and people or color and even an episode that comes close to sexual harassment from a woman of color? No, the sad white man mostly just takes the abuse and keeps on keeping on. He soldiers on because he is a white man behaving sadly and that is what white men do. So what is the terrible thing that has happened to Casey Affleck to make him move around in the world like a zombie, silent and brooding, angry and resentful. Well, spoiler alert, let me explain. Lee Chandler (played by Affleck the Younger), we find out in flashbacks, once had a wife and some kids. And he was a good man. And he behaved gladly and sometimes even a little badly. Like, one night he had his buddies over and they made too much noise. So his wife broke up the party and made them go home. Sulking, Lee makes a fire in the living room and then steps out into the night to get some more beer. By the time he gets home, his house has burned down with his children in it and only his wife escapes.

After an episode in the police station where you think that maybe he might be charged with something, manslaughter perhaps, he finally wigs out about what has happened and tries to grab a police officer’s gun, presumably to kill himself. The police politely restrain him and he is released to his brother’s care. Well, wow. So he burned his own house down and waved a gun around in a police station and lived to tell the tale because…sad white men’s lives matter and so accidently burning your kids and waving a gun at cops is not a big deal and just requires a little TLC! Don’t you get it? He is hurting and we are expected to cry for him because it is all so sad…for him! Not for his wife, not for those kids, not for his brother, but for him. All the bad things that happen around him, are his bad things.

Why are white men so sad? Well, in this film, they are sad because women are fucked up shrews and alcoholics who drag them down, give them heart attacks and, for god’s sake, try to talk to them and offer them food. They are also sad because they work for very little money and do the worst jobs in the world. They clean other peoples’ toilets, fix their showers and live in small garrets alone and with very bad furniture. Poor sad white men. This sad white man also has to take on the burden of parenthood after his brother’s death. His brother left his only son in Lee’s care and Lee and the boy tussle about girls, sex and authority until Lee learns to see the boy as his heir, as another white man who should enjoy his adolescence because soon everything will be taken from him too.

Yes, reader, this is a film made to measure for the coming Trump era, a time when white men can stop being sad, feel very glad and grab lots of pussy with impunity. Like Trump’s entire campaign, this film does not need to trumpet its white supremacy because this doctrine is embedded in every scene, it saturates every shot, it controls the camera and it lives in every hangdog moment that Lee Chandler spends staring silently off into space. Whiteness, the film tells us, is part of the frayed beauty of America and its power hangs in the balance in a world where bad things can and do happen to white men…even when they themselves cause those bad things to happen! Indeed, off screen Casey Affleck has been cast as a serial sexual abuser and while accusations of sexual harassment brought Black director Nate Parker’s Oscar hopes to a sordid conclusion, Affleck’s history with sexual harassment suits barely merits a mention. This film gives us a clue as to how powerful white men see the world, women, love, loss and violence – it is all one tragic narrative about how hurt and misunderstood they really are.

The world of “Manchester by the Sea” is the world imagined by white men in an era when a Black man was in the white house and women held public offices at many levels. It is a world where the white working class man has no power – he dies young (Lee’s brother), he lives alone (Lee), he cannot even enjoy spending time in his basement with other white men. His wife treats him badly and then later, after the tragic event (that he himself caused) his Black boss and his female customers abuse him. The white world of Manchester by the Sea is elegiac, brimming with a sense of tragedy that exceeds the events on the screen and asks us, begs us even to find a reason for why things should be this way.

There are great tragedies written about women who have killed or been forced to kill their children – think of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved who takes a hatchet to her baby rather than relinquish her back to slavery. Think of Medea who kills her children to take revenge on her husband and their father, Jason, for leaving them. Think of Sophie in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice who must choose to let one child live and the other die upon entering Auschwitz. These stories show infanticide as a deliberate action taken as part of a sacrifice or to prevent something worse than death from happening. No such logic underwrites Manchester by the Sea – the death of the children is almost gratuitous, it means nothing in the film except as its function as the source of irreducible melancholia for the white man. This same melancholia does not affect his wife (played by Michelle Williams) who quickly marries and has another child. There is no set up in the film to show us the bond between Lee and his children; there is little that explains the melancholia – is it guilt? Anger?

While critics fall over themselves to give this film an Oscar, we should ask what the film is really about. If this film is an allegory then it is a perfect symbolic landscape of the territory that ushered Trump into office – the film sees the world only through the eyes of working class white men. It sees such men as tragic and heroic, as stoic and moral, as stern but good. The film knows that the tragedy from which the white man suffers is of his own making but nonetheless the film believes that the tragedies that they have created happen to them and not to other people. This is the same logic by which Dylan Roof took the lives of nine African American church-goers in South Carolina while claiming to be defending white people from Black criminality and it is the logic by which Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded fourteen others in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara in 2014. Rodger left a manifesto behind that represented him as a victim of women who had sexually rejected him. It is the logic of every lone white gunman in America and while the media depicts these killers as mad and marginal, American cinema romanticizes them as sad and solitary. Obviously, Manchester by the Sea is not about a serial killer who turns a gun on innocents and yet innocents do die by his hand and rather than seeing this as a tragic narrative about white male narcissism or about the dangers of centering one group in a complex society, we are asked to read the film as just another story about white men behaving sadly.

And now, in Oscar season, we prepare to watch the films that celebrate white families, white song and dance, white grief, white music go up against films about Black families (Fences), Black grief (Moonlight), disaporic displacement (Lion), and win or lose, we can hear the storm troopers outside on the streets. Films that a few months ago just seemed to be about sad things or happy things, now appear in a new light and become part of our national tragedy in which all attempts to make diversity mean something, to resist systems that criminalize communities of color while representing white crime as law and order, to rethink sex, are quickly dismissed as identity politics, political correctness or authoritarian feminism. It is time, apparently to make America great again, to cater to the sad white man, to feel his pain, to lift him up and dry his tears. White men have been sad for too long apparently, now it is our turn.

In 1999, just six years after the rape and murder of a young gender variant person, Brandon Teena, and two friends in a small town in Nebraska, Kim Peirce released her first film, a dramatic account of the incident. The film, Boys Don’t Cry, which took years to research, write, fund, cast and shoot, was released to superb reviews and went on to garner awards and praise for the lead actor, Hilary Swank, and the young director, Kim Peirce, not to mention the film’s production team led by Christine Vachon. The film was hard hitting, visually innovative and marked a massive breakthrough in the representation of gender variant bodies. While there were certainly debates about decisions that Peirce made within the film’s narrative arc (the omission of the murder of an African American friend, Philip DeVine, at the same time that Brandon was killed), Boys Don’t Cry was received by audiences at the time as a magnificent film honoring the life of a gender queer youth and bringing a sense of the jeopardy of gender variant experiences to the screen. It was also seen as a sensitive depiction of life in small town USA. Kim Peirce spoke widely about the film in public venues and explained her relationship to the subject matter of gender variance, working class life and gender based violence.

In recent screenings of the film, some accompanied by Peirce as a speaker, others just programmed as part of a class or a film series, younger audiences have taken offence to the film and have accused the filmmaker of making money off the representation of violence against trans people. This at least was the charge made against Kim Peirce when she showed up to speak alongside a special screening of the film at Reed College in Oregon, just days after the Presidential election. Unbeknownst to the organizers, student protestors had removed posters from all around campus that advertised the screening and lecture and they formed a protest group and arrived early to the cinema on the night of the screening to hang up posters.

Posters at Reed College Protesting the Screening of Boys Don’t Cry, November 2016

These posters voiced a range of responses to the film including: “You don’t fucking get it!” and “Fuck Your Transphobia!” as well as “Trans Lives Do Not Equal $$” and to cap it all, the sign hung on the podium read: “Fuck this cis white bitch”!! The protestors waited until after the film had screened at Peirce’s request and then entered the auditorium while shouting “Fuck your respectability politics” and yelling over her commentary until Peirce left the room. After establishing some ground rules for a discussion, Peirce came back into the room but the conversation again got out of hand and finally a student yelled at Peirce: “Fuck you scared bitch.” At which point the protestors filed out and Peirce left campus.

This is an astonishing set of events to reckon with for those of us who remember the events surrounding Brandon Teena’s murder, the debates in the months that followed about Brandon Teena’s identity and, later, the reception of the film. Early transgender activism was spurred into action by the murder of Brandon Teena and many activists showed up at the trial of his killers. There were lots of debates at the time about whether Brandon was “butch” or “transgender” but queer and transgender audiences were mostly satisfied with the depiction of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. The film appealed to many audiences, queer and straight, and it continues to play around the world.

Director, Kimberly Peirce

The accounts given of these recent protests at Reed College give evidence of enormous vitriol, much of it blatantly misogynist (the repeated use of the word “bitch” for example) directed at a queer, butch film maker and they leave us with an enormous number of questions to face about representational dynamics, clashes between different historical paradigms of queer and transgender life and the expression of queer anger that, instead of being directed at murderous enemies in the mainstream of American political life, has been turned onto independent film makers within the queer and LGBT communities. Since this incident at Reed, I have heard from other students that they too felt “uncomfortable” with the representations of transgender life and death in Boys Don’t Cry. These students raise the following objections to the film some fifteen years after its release:

First, younger trans oriented audiences want to know if Peirce herself is trans. And they understand her as a non-trans person who is making money from the representation of violence against transgender bodies.

Second, they ask about the casting of a non-trans identified actor in the role of Brandon and wonder why a transgender man was not cast to play Brandon.

Third, students in particular have objected to the graphic depiction of rape in the film and feel that the scene is poorly orchestrated and the film is too mired in the pathologization and violation and punishment of transgender bodies.

These are interesting critiques and queries and worthy of conversation in their own right as well as within a clear understanding of the film’s visual grammar and representational strategies. It is not, however, a worthy activist goal to try to suppress the film, to cast it as transphobic and to target Kim Peirce herself as someone who has profited from the exploitation of transgender narratives. The film after all cost only 2 million to make and returned almost nothing to Peirce in profits.

How might we respond to these objections then in ways that do not completely dismiss the feelings of the students but that ask for different relations to protest, to the reading of complex texts and to the directing of anger about transphobic and homophobic texts onto queer cultural producers?

Here are a few thoughts:

1. We need to situate this film properly within the history of the representation of transgender characters. At the time that Peirce made this film, most films featured transgender people only as monsters, killers, sociopaths or isolated misfits.

Dressed To Kill, 1980

Few treated transgender people with even a modicum of comprehension and even fewer dealt with the transphobic environments that were part of heteronormative family life. There were very few films prior to Boys that focused upon transgender masculinity and when transgender male characters did appear in film, they were often depicted as women who passed as men for pragmatic reasons (for example The Ballad of Little Joe, 1993) or androgynous figures of whimsy (for example Orlando, 1992).

Boys Don’t Cry is literally the first film in history to build a credible story line around the credible masculinity of a credible trans-masculine figure. Period.

2. We cannot always demand a perfect match between directors, actors and the material in any given narrative. As a masculine person from a working class background who had experienced her own sexual abuse, Peirce identified strongly with the life and struggles of Brandon Teena. Peirce is not a transgender man, but is gender variant. The film she produced was sensitive to Brandon Teena’s social environment, his gender identity, his hard upbringing and his struggle to understand himself and to be understood by others. If Peirce told a story in which the transgender body was punished, she did not do so in order to participate in that punishment, she did it because that was what had actually happened to Brandon Teena and it would have been dishonest to tell the story any other way. The violence he suffered stood, at the time, as emblematic of the many forms of violence that transgender people suffered and it called upon the audiences for the film to rebuke the world in which such violence was common place.

Hilary Swank in her break through performance in Boys Don’t Cry

3. Transgender actors should play transgender roles but that is not always possible and certainly was a long shot at the time that Peirce made the film. Furthermore, it would be more effective to argue that transgender actors should not be limited to transgender roles. Peirce conducted a national search for a trans masculine actor for Boys Don’t Cry. She did screen tests with many trans identified people and she ultimately gave the role to the best actor available who was credible as a young female-bodied person passing for male. That actor was Hilary Swank, known in some circles at the time for her role in The Karate Kid and occasional appearances on Buffy the Vampire. Given the dependence of the success of the film on the acting ability of the main actor, it was vital to have a strong performer in this role and Swank was cast accordingly. Also why should a transgender actor only play a transgender role – shouldn’t we be asking cis-gendered male directors to cast transgender men and women as romantic leads, protagonists, super heroes?

4. We should not be asking for films to make detours around scenes of sexual violence instead we should be asking about what we actually mean by violence in any given context. In Boys Don’t Cry, the rape scene was brutal, hard to shoot, hard to act in and generally a difficult and emotionally draining piece of filmmaking. But it is also a deeply important part of the film and a way of representing faithfully the brutal violence that was meted out at the time to gender non-conforming bodies and it was true to the specific fate of Brandon Teena. The brutality of the rape also cuts in and out of scenes in the police station when Brandon Teena reports the rape. The police treat Brandon as a “girl” who must have been pleased by the attention from young men and they see the young men as normal, sexual subjects. Thus, the rape scene damns the police, highlights the role of violence in the enforcement of normativity and draws the audience’s sympathies to Brandon in a way that makes transphobia morally reprehensible. When we target scenes of rape and sexual violence in independent films about historical characters and call them unwatchable, we are making it difficult to grapple with all kinds of historical material that involves systemic violence and oppression.

But, we are also limiting the meaning of “violence” to physical assault. As so many theorists have shown, violence can also appear in the form of civility, empathy, absence, indifference and non-appearance. Violence is the glue of contemporary representation – we regularly watch films in which cars are blown up (every film with a chase scene), planes are shot down (many films with Tom Cruise or James Bond in them), superheroes sweep the streets of evil taking out hundreds of people at a time (Iron Man but also Ghost Busters), tidal waves sweep through entire cities (The Fifth Wave), colonies of fish are swallowed up by marauding sharks (Finding Nemo), a female deer is shot in front of her child (Bambi), aliens land and eliminate buildings (The War of the Worlds), zombie mobs chase humans and eat them slowly (The Walking Dead) and so on. To focus solely upon sexual violence and to ignore the more general context of cinematic violence and to take complaints only to queer directors who are struggling to represent queer life rather than to straight directors ignoring queer and trans life betrays a limited vision of representational systems and ideologies and ultimately leaves those systems and their biases completely intact.

“WHO KILLED BAMBI?” SID VICIOUS

At a time of political terror, at a moment when Fascists are in highest offices in the land, when white men are ready and well positioned to mete out punishment to women, queers and undocumented laborers, we have to pick our enemies very carefully. Spending time and energy protesting the work of an extremely important queer filmmaker is not only wasteful, it is morally bankrupt and misses the true danger of our historical moment.

We do not know what to say or do. We who are usually so full of words, ideas, programs and plans of action, we too fall silent in the face of such devastating news. Donald J. Trump, the clownish buffoon who has been caught on tape berating people of color, women and even babies, for God’s sake, will be the next president of the United States of America. If we thought George W. was bad, wait until we see what a government stacked with right wing Republicans and led by an egotistical fool might do to all semblances of intellectual exchange, economic redistribution and racial justice.

Is this how the Fascism starts, as a creeping, insidious mood of hatred slipping into everyday conversation? Does it begin with the eschewing of complex explanations in favor of simplistic ‘us against them’ accounting? Does Fascism begin when white supremacy is courted, relied upon, solicited but never named as such? Or did this particular political disaster begin when Donald Trump’s outrageous, sexist, misogynist, racist comments were played for the whole nation…and many people did not care because they hear worse everyday, in their homes, at their work places, in public? How about when FBI Director, James Comey, decided to revive the inquiry into Hilary Clinton’s email despite no new evidence compelling him to do so? Has this all been a coup initiated by the FBI, ratified by law and carried out by a rabid group of white men, endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, cheered on by David Duke and involving millions of mostly white voters, including a majority of white women, who happily, cheerily cast their vote for a liar, an avowed racist and a failed businessman who has cheated, shouted and shoved his way into the spotlight?

We are in checkmate because we turned our backs for a moment and when we did Donald J. Trump moved chess pieces at will, taking the queen and cornering the king. We are down for the count, lost in translation, behind, bewildered, frustrated and legitimately scared. Trump’s election is bad for women, bad for all people of color, bad for business, bad for immigrants, bad for the environment, bad for the economy, bad for babies, bad and getting worse. Donald Trump is good for himself, good for his scary and much more ideologically extreme running mate, Mike Pence, good for angry white men, good for tax dodgers, global warming deniers, corporate elites, unrepentant white supremacists, good for nothing.

As we near the end of the first day of the new order of Trumpocracy, we better ask ourselves what is to be done. We better meet and sound our outrage, we better establish a plan of action. We need to find better leaders – Hilary Clinton was not the leader many of us wanted even as we felt she would be a capable and reasonable presence in the White House. Where are the young, impassioned, visionary leaders who can, unlike Hilary, outline a detailed opposition to Trumpocracy, give people the argument for universal health care coverage, arm people with not statistics but a critical way of thinking? We need a representative who will actively assuage working class resentment without stirring up racial antipathy; someone who will explain why we pay taxes rather than boast about not doing so. We need someone who does not feel entitled to win office but who rides to victory on a coalition of explicitly leftist platforms. We need a smart, informed speaker who understands the history of race in America, who opposes prisons and demands gun reform and who refuses to apologize for working on behalf of the most vulnerable populations and in opposition to the most entitled.

There have been many shocks this week, shocks that reminded us that “we” are not at all united and “we” will often be defeated. For example, Five Thirty Eight reports today that while Hilary Clinton won women’s votes by 12 points, she lost the votes of white women overall. This is a devastating reminder of how effective compulsory heteronormativity is in this country. Heterosexual white women, despite being regaled by audio tapes of Trump boasting about “grabbing pussy,” despite numerous women stepping forward to give accounts of being molested or harassed by Trump, despite his public and open contempt for women he dates, women he rejects and women he would not even consider, many of these women voted willingly for boorish, violent, contemptuous masculinity. They voted with their men; they voted their racial investments in whiteness, they voted against the security of Roe v. Wade, they voted to continue being helpmates rather than agents, they voted to be cheerleaders and mascots rather than players in the game, they voted against the first female president of the United States. They voted to continue being what Simone De Beauvoir called “the second sex.”

We have faced political winters before and winter will come again. In 1974 in the wake of a horrifying series of political murders in the US, after the deaths of Martin Luther King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X, Gil Scott Heron penned, “Winter in America,” an anthem for dark times. Shana Redmond’s book, Anthem, provides a rich account of the adoption of anthems by Black groups in the diaspora. In the history that Redmond provides, the anthem is wrenched out of its role as a universal statement of belonging and national aspiration and transformed into a rallying cry for a disenfranchised group and a spiritual call to action. We need an anthem now and “Winter in America,” unfortunately, has become relevant again. In the liner notes for his album, Gil Scott-Heron explained his title and connected his music to the political climate around him:

Winter is a metaphor: a term not only used to describe the season of ice, but the period of our lives through which we are traveling…Western iceman have attempted to distort time. Extra months on the calendar and daylight saved what was Eastern Standard. We approach winter the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises. But we, as Black people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We will see you in Spring.

We are now facing our own winter; we too have just put the clocks back to save Eastern Standard time; we too approach a deeply depressing season run by snowmen buoyed by a “whitelash” (Van Jones); we too want to believe that Spring will come but fear that only more winter lies ahead. In this our own “most depressing period,” we watch bankers and realtors and politicians convince working class people that callous disregard for the public good, outrageous extravagance and corrupt racially skewed economic practices will “make America great again.” They will not. They will confirm us as a confederacy of rogues, a global bully, a white supremacist nation committed to rewarding the rich, locking up the poor and handing everything to the clowns, the snowmen, the would-be kings, the small minded men with small hands, big wallets, self-centered dreams and willowy, empty women on their arms. Gil Scott-Heron looked to Black community for hope and termed Black people as a “source of endless energy, endless beauty, and endless determination.” He promised “love and light” in the potentiality of tomorrow even as he mourned the experience of “living in a nation that just can’t stand much more.” Now that democracy is once more “ragtime on the corner,” now that peace is out of reach, now that white men have their fingers on the scales of justice, now that white heterosexual women are standing by their men, now that we know that many gay people and some people of color must have voted for Trump, we better find some coalitions that will still offer the possibility of “energy, beauty and determination.”

As Game of Thrones warned us in season one, episode one, 2011, “Winter is Coming.” For the House of Stark, this was a warning that political peace is fleeting and unreliable. For us it is a terrifying future that we now confront. In Game of Thrones, winter came and went, men were slaughtered, spirits raised the dead, and women rulers rose up as fighters, witches, as young queens, as rape avengers. Even in this most patriarchal of medieval fantasy worlds, there is space to imagine female sovereignty and a better world forged out of a coalition of the very old, the very young, women, queers, native peoples, people of color, trans people, disabled people, wildings, wolves and dragons. We need to tap into our utopian fantasies now, our freedom dreams (Robin Kelley) to find small channels of potential running through the political architectures in which we are currently imprisoned. I am worried we will not find a way out, and I know you are too; but I also know that we are all ready for the fight of our lives.

In a recent response to the shootings of Latino gay men and others in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida, on June 12 The Atlantic ran an article claiming that violence against LGBT people in the US was all too common and was even more common than violence directed at other minorities. The main argument of this article was repeated four days later in The New York Times under the heading “L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to Be Targets of Hate Crimes Than Any Other Minority Group.” Both articles cited the same source, namely research conducted by Southern Poverty Law Center, and both quote a senior fellow there, Mark Potok. In the article that appeared in The Atlantic, Potok is quoted as saying: “LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than Jews or black people.”

This is an interesting claim in that it presumes both that LGBT people are neither Jews nor Black people and that killers target people only on the basis of one strand of hatred! It also creates a specious hierarchy of violence within which white LGBT people are cast as more vulnerable than other minority groups. These kinds of widely circulated claims support a generalized expression of LGBT vulnerability that appeared on social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, in the wake of the murders. But these killings were highly specific and as new material surfaces on Omar Mateen’s tortured relation to his own sexuality, we want to challenge this sense of an amorphous homophobic threat that separates homophobic violence out from the particular, convulsive expressions of racialized hate.

Both of the articles on hate crime bury contradictory demographic details about hate crimes against LGBT people towards the end of their reports. In The New York Times, for example, a chart representing the distribution of LGBT violence across race and class tells quite a different story than the sensational headline. When sorted by race, the charts reveal that, in the words of the reporter, “the vast majority of those who were killed were Black and transgender people.” And the charts show that even among those who were not killed, the LGBT people who were most often the victims of hate crimes and violence were people of color.

Obviously the shooting of 49 people in a gay club on a night geared towards Latino gay men shakes all LGBT communities to their core and reminds us of other violent and hate-filled attacks on other clubs over the past few decades. In other queer clubs, on other nights, other bodies have fallen victim to the toxic masculinities that imagine violence as the solution to shifts in the status quo that might shake up hierarchies of sex and gender. But on this night, in this club, the target of steroid fueled, militaristic, narcissistic, deeply conflicted masculinity was a group of mostly Latino gay men.

Maybe your Ma blessed you on the way out the door. Maybe she wrapped a plate for you in the fridge so you don’t come home and mess up her kitchen with your hunger. Maybe your Tia dropped you off, gave you cab money home. Maybe you had to get a sitter. Maybe you’ve yet to come out to your family at all, or maybe your family kicked you out years ago. Forget it, you survived… Maybe your half-Latin-ass doesn’t even speak Spanish; maybe you barely speak English. Maybe you’re undocumented.

Torres carefully and tenderly located the victims of the Orlando massacre not as a unified group of gay victims but as a happily disordered group of Latino queers with varying relations to race, language, class, citizenship, family and kinship. Using a second person form of address – “maybe you’re undocumented” – Torres talks to the dead rather than around them, about them, through them. He talks to the dead, recognizing their differences from one another and from the culture that too often threatens, excludes, exploits or ignores them, and Torres situates the club goers in relation to nightlife, to Orlando, to each other and to larger LGBT communities. In his next paragraph, Torres describes what lies outside the club – Christians, Trump, exclusion, racism – and then draws a magic line around the club that designates it as a safe space for people who are patently not safe elsewhere in the culture. Back in the world, Torres reminds the lost, struggle continues, but here, in the club you thrive, you dance, you live: “You didn’t come here to be a martyr, you came to live, papi. To live, mamacita. To live, hijos. To live, mariposas.”

Torres’ beautiful song for the slain mariposas recognizes the beauty and the fragility of this community and situates that fragility in relation to the multiple vectors of violence that exist outside the club and that always threaten to make their way inside. Some of those violators will arrive in the form of unstable men with weapons, some will come in the form of la migra or homeland security, some will and did arrive in the form of the police and others will arrive in the form of white LGBT people who see this violation as their own and incorporate this crime into a general narrative of anti-gay violence.

Christina Hanhardt has written at length about the specificity of anti-violence claims in LGBT communities and the ways in which some of those claims lead to increased police presence in LGBT communities and increased jeopardy for communities of color. In a summation of her position in The Scholar and Feminist Online (S&F Online), Hanhardt
identifies the role of gentrifying gay male communities within neoliberal and post-welfare urban landscapes. Gay and lesbian gentrifiers, she explains, have often “been hailed as the remedy for urban problems.” And so, all too often, white urban gay populations replace racialized and poor communities and become sites of investment. She writes:

Central to the history of LGBT activism, in which the themes of violence and safety have been so prominent, is the calculation of risk: the risk of violence associated with a gay vulnerability that calls for anticrime initiatives as well as the risk of lost profit linked to real estate speculation. One outcome has been to redefine normative gay identity as an identity threatened by those deemed “criminal” (in particular, the racialized poor), while finding solutions in risk negotiations, including self-regulation and open financial markets.

In other words, urban development projects often depend upon and encourage an often white, gay creative class while displacing and endangering poor communities of color. In turn, white LGBT communities can imagine themselves as part of the nation and its prosperity while queer communities of color are situated as sites of crime, illegality and protest cultures.

Given the different histories of white LGBT urban populations and LGBT communities of color in relation to space, property, policing and risk, we might ask who “we” are after Orlando. Does the attack on these brown bodies reflect a more generalized vulnerability experienced by LGBT communities as a whole? Is there, in fact, any connection at all between the vulnerability of white LGBT communities to homophobia and the ongoing violence that LGBT communities of color face within the current climate of anti-immigrant, anti-Black, pro-banks, pro-business, free market mayhem?

In the wake of Orlando, it might be time to break up the fantasy of the LGBT monolith not in favor of ever more precise calibrations of identity but on behalf of the urgent need to confront state violence whether it is expressed through a security regime that works well on behalf of bankers and politicians but not at all on behalf of poor people of color or whether it comes in the form of incorporative strategies aimed at privileged queers or increased policing aimed at queers of color. While gay marriage is quickly being offered up as the motivation for increased homophobic hate crime activity – the NYT proposed “Ironically, part of the reason for violence against L.G.B.T. people might have to do with a more accepting attitude toward gays and lesbians in recent decades, say people who study hate crimes” – a better way to understand gay marriage is as part and parcel of an incorporative logic in which opposition is gobbled up and turned into more of the same.

As middle class white LGBT people celebrate their access to normative social forms and agree to pay the price for such acceptance by consenting to new forms of violent exclusion, they/we cannot simultaneously claim to be the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, the most victimized of the victims, the most in need of shelter, protection and sanctuary. Orlando showed me at least that the security state we live in with its second amendment values and its shouty, crude formulations of “us” and “them” needs to be countered with complex, intricate, risky conversations about who “we” are and who “we” want to become.

For Torres, Orlando brings us face to face with the transformative power of Latin night at the queer club: “The only imperative is to be transformed, transfigured in the disco light.” In a similar way, Orlando brings us to José Muñoz’s conjuring of queer utopia as “a type of affective excess that presents the enabling force of a forward-dawning futurity.” Orlando is not a generalized and non-specific “we” it is a clearly situated “you” standing, dancing, living and dying in the wee hours of the morning, in a space at the very furthest edge of community, on the verge of a forward-dawning futurity into which other worlds, could and will come to be.

It is not a question of whether you are or were a fan of David Bowie, it is a question of which Bowie was your Bowie. My Bowie, at various times, was the lightning streaked face of Aladdin Sane, the dulcet voiced soul man of Young Americans and the rock god of the Orwellian extravaganza, Diamond Dogs. I also kept Station to Station and Low on my turntable for weeks at a time in the 1970’s during Bowie’s “Berlin” period and listened to David Live obsessively, especially the mash up of “Sweet Thing” and “Candidate” from Diamond Dogs. For me, as for so many, David Bowie represented a glittering, odd, unearthly reminder that life is about change, risk, madness and mayhem, and that while our domestic structures work hard to keep the madness at bay, we must be ready at all times to “turn and face the strange.”

Social History. Housing. Manchester, England. Circa 1970’s. Slum clearance in Salford showing a terraced area being demolished.

To understand Bowie, you partly have to understand what England was like in the 1970’s and what it meant to suddenly, in the middle of this a grey, ruinous landscape of charred buildings, post-war debris, and financial collapse, find out that there is a “starman “waiting in the skies.” This was the message that British youth watching Top of the Pops in 1972 received loud and clear from a beautifully eccentric and sexy performance of “Starman” by Bowie and Mick Ronson. Dressed in shiny pant suits and wearing high boots and shaggy hair-do’s, Bowie and Ronson really did look like they had fallen to earth from some distant planet where people had fun, believed in something and knew they could change worlds. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust told us to be receptive to the messages from Mars and other planets; he counseled youth to listen to the secret memos from the starman, to pay attention to the coded communications from other worlds; he told us that the starman would only speak to us if we sparkled (“if we sparkle, he may land tonight”), and he taught us that all that sparkles is indeed gold. And no sooner did he create a persona with which to tell new stories about sex, rock and riot than he killed the man and started again.

My first Bowie album was Aladdin Sane. I studied the cover art for some clues as to who this ambiguously gendered person might be and I thrilled to the persona of the mad lad singing of mortality, protest, drag queens and race riots in Detroit. I knew no queer people at that time and knew of few escapes from the suffocating normativity of British school life in the 1970’s. But I felt that Bowie represented something special, something just out reach, something or someone that I did not know yet but set off to encounter. With his otherworldly voice that ranged from low growls to ethereal falsettos, and with his calls to rebellion – both social and gendered – Bowie captured the emergent political imagination of a generation. He was queer before queer, punk before punk, cool long after Presley. Bowie disobeyed all laws of genre and he merged English glam rock with US soul music, rhythm and blues with jazz and funk with electronica without seeming opportunistic, appropriative or dilettantish.

Bowie’s sexuality was always up for grabs. It was not a question of whether he was gay (“John, I’m Only Dancing”) or straight (“Be My Wife”), many of his public relationships have, after all, been with women; but Bowie always laid claim to a kind of excess, a set of identities that exceeded norms and expectations and that were some combination of male femininity (Ziggy), masculine exotic (Aladdin Sane), Martian sexiness, ethereal beauty, originality and innovation. The word most often used about Bowie, and one I have made recourse to here, is “otherworldly.” His reputation as profoundly alien was enhanced by movies like Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 space oddity:The Man Who Fell to Earth. This movie, like no other (apart from maybe his “walk off” cameo in Zoolander!) confirmed Bowie’s status as unearthly. He needed no make up to be convincing as a man from another world – in the film he is called a “visitor,” a “freak,” an “alien” and he manages to convey a sense of bodily oddness that is unique in film.

Is there life on Mars? If you believe in David Bowie, the answer is yes. While earth for Bowie is a place where time is on perpetual repeat (“Always Crashing in the Same Car”), in the exotic and exciting moonage daydreams that Bowie conjures, apocalypse appears alongside utopia, futures are exciting and curtailed (“we can be heroes…just for one day”), and the body is a place to play out colorful fantasies of love and rebellion. As we say goodbye to a truly queer icon, a performer who invited us to “press your space face close to mine, love,” we also bid farewell to someone who has reinvented fame, spectacle, eccentricity and stardom.

But, Bowie left us a final album to decode, Blackstar, where he intones:

“I can’t answer why (I’m not a gangster)

But I can tell you how (I’m not a flam star)

We were born upside-down (I’m a star star)

Born the wrong way ‘round (I’m not a white star)

(I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangster

I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar

I’m not a pornstar, I’m not a wandering star

I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar.”

Not a white star, not a gangster, not a wandering star, a black star – Bowie’s final message, part physics/part undercommons, draws upon the metaphors of space that saturate his entire output. A black star in physics represents, Wikipedia tells us “a transitional phase between a collapsing star and a singularity,” it is a zone where event and infinity collide, where matter disintegrates into a vacuum. It is a space of death and dying. But black star could also be a way of rethinking racialized embodiment itself such that the thin white duke recognizes himself in the black aesthetics that swirl through his music, the soul inflections that he channels and inhabits and the machinery of fame that works through a process of Black music/white stars, transferring fame to white bodies from music created through and around the experience of blackness. What others appropriate, Bowie inhabits. What others steal, Bowie acknowledges. What others hold at a distance, Bowie embraces.

“I’m a blackstar,” Bowie sings, “I’m a blackstar.” So, while we attribute some of Bowie’s incandescent oddness to gender and sexual ambiguity, race is also a huge part of what rendered Bowie a star – not a white star, not a pornstar, not a wandering star, but a black star. As Bowie now passes into immortality, as he assumes legendary proportions, as he comes to represent the expansiveness of wild reinvention, musical experimentation, bodily flexibility, political imagination and queer uncertainty, we should look up to the sky and sparkle in the hopes of receiving a message from pop culture’s most beloved astronaut, a starman waiting in the sky.